NY Jets #6 - Part 1

Don't be deceived. Through the blur of the heat of a Miami afternoon, you see a #6 dropping back to pass, and you say to yourself, oh yes, that's my quarterback. But then you notice that the Poly-Turf surface is a sign of a different time. You are not hallucinating, nor seeing a mirage of the heat waves from the artificial field. You are not looking at Mark Sanchez. It is 1973. You are looking at Bill Demory. He is dropping back to pass.

There is a special category in New York Jets lore in which Bill Demory #6 fits: quarterbacks who were required to step in when Joe Namath was injured in the early 70's. During the unfortunate 1973 season - a year where the Jets were playing away from home for half the season because the Mets were playing in the postseason - Al Woodall went in for Joe and was then periodically replaced by Bill Demory #6. Quarterbacking is a position that requires so much responsibility, offers so much potential for notoriety, and yet it leaves many well-meaning athletes in the dustbin of history. Covering for Namath in 1973, Demory almost exclusively handed the ball off to Emerson Boozer and John Riggins to earn a 9-7 win, a game that saw him throw the ball seven times, making one completion for all of 11 yards. Then he played fine in a loss against Pittsburgh. Then he beat the Patriots again, this time with a little more command, but then this was the Patriots of the early 70's who were actually a funny team to watch.

Over a period of five games that season, sometimes starting, sometimes in relief for Woodall, he threw 12 for 39 for 159 yards. That doesn't even seem possible. That seems like the below average performance for a single start. So in that action shot above at right, stolen as all things are from the Internet, is the rarest of rare finds: a photograph of Bill Demory passing. The Jets never really had anyone formidable ready to start in Joe's place, so the running game of Boozer and Riggins was its only remaining strength. He did not play in 1974. Thus, travelers, we end our trip down Bill Demory lane, with apologizes to you all for the avoidable pun.

Normally, with exception of high school and pee wee fields, #6 is a backup quarterback's number. Maybe he's a kicker. Maybe he is the quarterback of the team that the hero's squad plays against in football movies. But don't mistake your average Hollywood "Semi-Tough" backup with Bubby Brister. We know that Walter Andrew "Bubby" Brister III was a starting quarterback with Pittsburgh for a while, and he was a backup the rest of his career for the Eagles and then the Jets. But Bubby Brister was feistier than most backups - a shouter, a ranter on the field, a down-home rip-snorter who earns the right to be the winner of the Booth Lustig Award Winner for Downright Goofy Names in the Category of Uniform #6. None of this, though - his guts, his remembered acts of grit, his country-friend nickname - none of this did any earthly good to 3-13 Kotite squad in 1995.

But fortune smiled on Bubby better than it did the Jets. After he left, Bubby Brister became a folk hero on a 1998 Denver Broncos team that nearly went undefeated and eventually beat the Jets in the AFC Championship and then won the Super Bowl. Touche, Bubby Brister. Touche.

****

Ah, but we must discuss Doug Brien. Before the end of the 2004 season, he was merely another kicker, a man with the same dream as the one Adam Viniateri once had long ago - to hit the big one to win the playoff game that sends your team on to the next round, and then the next, then the next, like a good luck charm with the golden toe I once told Pat Leahy he had at Hofstra. In retrospect, the 2004 Jets seem as familiar as a cop show, a medical drama, or a courtroom scene. You watch it knowing that the outcome will be resolved in a familiar way. In the end you're a little angry at yourself for watching in the first place. Really, you could have run on the treadmill and watched it on the big screen at the gym with its sound turned down. At 9-3 on December 5, 2004, the Jets went 1-3 the rest of the way, with a 23-7 loss to the Pats. As I say, it was a familiar experience as Decembers went for Jets fans.

They traveled to San Diego, and it was there, after the Jets nearly gave the game away, that Doug Brien hit a field goal to beat the Chargers in the first round of the playoffs. The script picks up from there in Pittsburgh, where the Jets hang tough with the 15-1 Pittsburgh Steelers at heinz Field. Then Doug Brien missed two field goals within the last two minutes, and the Jets lost 20-17.

How could it have happened? One of them glanced the top of the goal post. Each was missed from within the Steelers' 40 yard line. He had made a comparable field goal from 42 yards earlier in the second quarter. I didn't think the 11-6 Jets could win the game in the first place, but Doug Brien's apparent cool under pressure had me thinking off the script, to a world of insane ideas about being in the AFC Championship against Adam Viniateri. Then everything came back down to Earth. Doug Brien missed two field goals. I went to the bathroom and vomited. Doug Brien lost his job.

But what if he had made both of the kicks? Let's go back to 2004. Let's imagine that, like Al Pacino's character Arthur Kirkland in ...And Justice for All, Doug Brien managed to do something off the usual script. Let's say he makes those two field goals, ones that he would have been able to make at any other point in the season, and the Jets win 23-20. They move on and improbably beat the soon-to-be champion Patriots in the AFC Championship. I experience joy.

But really, what happens to me, living as I do in Philadelphia? The Jets play in the Super Bowl against the Philadelphia Eagles, and whatever animus has been set aside by my fellow Philadelphians against their native New Yorker friend evaporates entirely. My claim to their affections has always been that I am not a Giants fan, and that is all that they need to know. One of my colleagues at work suggested that their shared futility makes the Jets and Eagles a kind of cousin to one another, like the King of England and the Czar of Russia. I have relied upon this good faith comradery for years now, and I don't know how in January 2005 I would have recovered from a win over the Eagles in the Super Bowl or a loss, for that matter, knowing that my friends would never really look at me the same ever again, nor I them.

We will never have to worry about it (we never really should even have entertained the thought in the first place) because of Doug Brien, and there is a dull fragment of satisfaction in that for me.

NY Jets #49 - Part 1

Number 49 exists in a purgatorial state. Sometimes a running back, sometimes a linebacker, sometimes a tight end, occasionally a corner, he is rarely the star. He is an opportunist, awaiting his next chance, but only a few minutes away from the cut. Therefore, the list for #49 is a curious mix of players who made little distinction in the pros and, on the average, only about a season and a half with the Jets. It is the most notable list in that sense only; those that came did not stay long.

At cornerback in 1980, Steve Carpenter #49 played pro about as long as the average player in the NFL - two seasons. Originally from the southern Illinois town of Staunton, he attended Western Illinois, was undrafted, played a year for the Jets, then returned to where he more or less came from, and played for the St. Louis football Cardinals for the 1981 season.

There was once a time in my life where you could name any part of the areas in and around St. Louis, and I could tell you what zip code you had. It was a requirement for my job. I was a volunteer coordinator for an adult literacy program, and I had to match volunteers with students. I had a big map at my desk outlined into zip codes, and if you were an adult literacy student in Jennings, MO (63135), I cold find you a volunteer tutor. If you lived in what used to be the old Gaslight district (63108) maybe I could get somebody from Clayton (63105) to lend a hand. But it was harder going in Staunton, Illinois (62088). It was on my map, but I never got any calls from there. And that's my story.

Ten years later, Travis Curtis #49 started as a safety in 1990. He nabbed five interceptions in 1987, his rookie season, with the Cardinals. That was their last year before moving to Phoenix. I remember people telling me while I was in St. Louis in the early 90's, after Bill Bidwell moved his team out west, that people were there at Lambert Airport to jeer them off to Arizona. I could never comprehend that a group of fans would let their team go happily, willingly and, according to reports, joyfully. I just didn't get it. Bidwell moved them from Chicago to St. Louis in 1960, and nobody I ever met in the Mound City ever said they went to a game or even thought about how much fun they were.

In Jonathan Franzen's early novel The Twenty-Seventh City - which near as I remember is a ridiculous story of an Indian (Hindu) woman's takeover of the St. Louis police department - there is a moment when fans are at a Cardinals football game at Busch Stadium when, I think, the scoreboard begins reading gibberish and the entire building catches fire. It's as awkwardly imagined and embarrassing to read as Cardinals football was to watch (at least that's what the natives used to say). In his 1988 review of the novel, Michiko Kakutani wrote that, "Though Mr. Franzen uses language and an adept puzzle-making ability to create a clever narrative of Pynchonesque intricacy, he has a tendency to manufacture complications for the sheer sake of complexity." Did a fan of Cardinals football have any choice but go for broke and light the stadium on fire?

Maybe Franzen wasn't a fan of Cardinals football; I confess I have never been a fan of his writing. I always feel like reading his fiction is like taking a forced march through SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. Instead, he is tiresome. As I recall, in the novel, the nefarious Police Chief S. Jammu wants to unite together the city (i.e., 63103) and the suburban county (i.e., 63115), which would be deeply troubling to anyone, say, like Franzen who has previously waxed in a characteristically defensive manner about the beauty of growing up in the fortunate suburb of Webster Groves (63119). And just in case you were still paying attention, Travis Curtis played a nearly full season for the Jets in the oblivions of Bruce Coslet's 1990 Jets squad, and I have nothing to show for it, except a memory of sweating my way through that particular football season, trying to keep a doomed relationship alive, wondering where I was going to work after college graduation. The answer was St. Louis, apparently then America's 27th largest city. If Jammu had gotten her way, who knows what could have happened? Today St. Louis now our nation's 52nd city. Poor, poor Gateway. I was hoping, for the sake of verisimilitude, that it would be the 49th.

It was a bigger city than #27 in 1971 when George Hoey was drafted by the Cardinals as a defensive back, and in his rookie year, he ran back a kickoff for a touchdown against the Philadelphia Eagles at Busch Stadium. By 1975, white flight had St. Louis in a downward population spiral, and George Hoey was given #49 to wear for five games in the hapless Jets season of 1975, his last in the NFL.

Postcards from the Other Side

I get comments. Quite an impressive number of them for a blog that no one really reads. I get encouraging thoughts and observations. Slimbo helps out a lot, and I love his art work, his observations about his life and obsessions. But other people, people whom I don't know, will check in and tell me they like what I do. That's great. Even my Mom comments in an encouraging fashion from time to time, posing as Anonymous, but I can recognize her voice through the vast series of tubes comprising the Internet. I can't tell you how often I feel like chucking this in, and someone out there will say something interesting or, even better, offer a correction concerning a Jets player about whom I've written.

I get other kinds of commenting - spam, of course. Great stuff, really. Sometimes it's in Chinese, Russian or German. Not long after I wrote about Rex Ryan's love for his lovely wife's feet, I received a comment that began with the following:

"Willkommen im Sex-Community...."

I am absolutely certain that a foreign language porn film from the 70's that, as a teenager, I managed to see through the static of primitive parental controls on our cable box, began with that very line. Welcome to the Sex Community. Germany's such a sexy culture. Kind of.

Or how about this one that starts with:

I sit in the car for about 30minutes when I see my wife and her girlfriend come out...

Stop right there. It's a revenge tragedy. It's an episode of "Red Shoes Diary." It's an old college friend's drunken fantasy designed to enliven his marriage. It's a case of mistaken identity. I love it. I see it going directly to DVD.

I know it's spam when it starts with this:

I love edlsjets.blogspot.com! Here I always find a lot of helpful information for myself.

Ah! Caught you! No you don't. I know you don't. I am absolutely certain that nothing that I offer here is even remotely helpful to you. That is not the point of this blog. Other blogs offer constructive, guiding, redeeming advice and discourse on a number of relevant topics. Again, that is not the purpose of what we do here.

I hit the mother lode of spam back in 2008 when we did the piece on the Booth Lusteg Winners for Funniest-Sounding names. It might be because I cut and pasted the word "hayseed" from dictionary.com, or maybe my lucky number just came up, but I received 37 comments (one or two is more the norm, and one of them is usually me replying) - all spam - offering everything under the sun. Someday, after global warming has its way with us, after the Big Melt, they'll wonder what preoccupied Western culture in its last days. This list of comments gives us some insight: references to free online movies, mail order drugs, Christian lesbian pen pals, something from Vooptomesog, hot Rolex watches, "britney spears butt flash at starbucks," blood for cash, cash for female breast hormones, how to eat selfish (sic) without fear of allergies, penis enlargement (of course), and an enticement for soliciting a New York City escort: "Coming out of the worldly tensions and monotony is just possible with the gracious presence of the New York escort services girls." It's just possible.

There was plenty more, though. Something from a guy named "Marshall," who just thought he'd give a reach-out. There were plenty of offers for online gambling. There was interesting minutiae related to the Man United kit through the years that somehow made its way to this blog, like an errant piece of information heard through shortwave radio. Lots of reminders to play online bingo. And though a guy named "Roland" wasn't sure whether or not the mystery product he believes in is available outside Australia, he just can't get the sound out of his head, and apparently he made out "like a bandit." Would that we all could.

****

It's not often, but every once in a while, we'll get mail in the Infinite Jets bag that comes from the other side of the playing fields of my memory - mail from real people and not just figments of my imagination. Often these are written on behalf of someone I've discussed in the Numbers and Names, the New York Jets By the Numbers, or whatever I'm calling it these days.

Of course, of course, of course I realize that each and every human being who wore a Jets uniform had a life after they left the Jets, and sometimes, if I can get information on such things, I'll include it. After all, these men are human beings, and if there is one thing I have tried to communicate on this blog it's just how brief their careers in football are, if not with the Jets. But I only know about as much as my limited attention span and my day job can afford me, and often that's simply not enough. When people write in with additional information, it's fantastic.

For example, when I wrote about Jim Richards #26 in the nearly endless list of 26's, I got a helpful comment alerting me to his service in the army and his eventual success as an engineer. Whether it was written by Richards himself or a friend or family member, I don't know. We sometimes picture these players in some kind of purgatorial place where young men are always players and somehow their dreams were lost to the winds of Fate. But it's not true. That's nonsense, and I know it. I appreciate it when people fill in the gaps. After all, the web's information is long-lasting. Although no one reads my cave scrawlings, they will nevertheless survive through a great deal of time, perhaps even past the Big Melt, provided that a post-apocalyptic Earth has at least dial-up somewhere.

Or there was the time that, in response to my query to the universe about Dainard Paulson #40, I received the comment that he was living in Seattle and that the commenter had been a happy guest in his home "several years ago." And I found that comforting. It was a simple, clear statement without much color, but it gives you the sense of someone real and decent.

And then the other day, a commenter, saying that he was Michael Marvaso, son of #47 Tommy Marvaso, wrote quite declaratively, that I was a "joke." I had, again, with the limited means with which I work alone in my cave, written only about Marvaso's exploits with the Jets in terms of a single play I was able to find online - a YouTube clip of him getting beat for a pass against the Redksins in 1976. Marvaso the Younger wrote:

"You scour the internet to find one pass of him getting beat and decide to put your two cents in on his entire career? Go look harder and you will find his tackling Walter Peyton, OJ Simpson, making John Riggins fumble. Let me tell you something about why Tommy Marvaso was only in the league for 2 years, Chief. He knew that he was not going to live the rest of his live on the money they were making back then. So he went back to school got like 5 degrees and became an executive at Bell Atlantic then continuing to Work for the second largest engineering company in the world . Now he lives the life you dream about and non of it came from football."

I want to make something abundantly clear; although I did not mean to write critically about Mr. Marvaso's father, he certainly construed it that way, and I understand why he's angry. Let me tell you something. If some punk kid wrote online about my father's career in terms of one decision he made, one gaffe, one wrong turn, I would probably be pissed, too. I happen to believe my father is one of the best people alive, so I too would reply to someone who even appeared to suggest otherwise. I might not necessarily make reference to other things that Michael Marvaso makes reference to (yeesh), but I would want to set the record straight. So, I appreciate it, Michael. Thank you.

One thing he took particular exception to was my saying "Gone for good, Tommy." Again, I get why he's mad, but I really didn't mean to suggest something disrespectful to his dad. I was suggesting that gone for good is a feeling, a notion of what it means to be a Jets fan. That didn't get through. Much of this is often an exercise in writing, in thinking aloud, but I realize Tommy Marvaso had a life after football, and now I know it was obviously a successful one. Jesus, I would hope so. But that sense of something being gone for good is what being a Jets fan is, and it appeared a good phrase to use. I'm sorry that it didn't seem that way.

And history is not fair. As he points out, we don't get to see his dad play as well as he really did; I only found a fragment of something online that came in passing. That's not fair at all.

But to reply to the comment in full - no, I never really wanted to be a jock growing up. I never was. I never fit in with athletes but never felt like a loser because of it. I write here about the names and numbers as only as they exist to me in my memory, like the Tramalfadorians in Billy Pilgrim's head. They are the way I gauge the passage of time, the past, the present. But yes, fortunately, I do have a life. I am not a legend that I know of, but if I were, I would think I would probably be one to someone other than my own mother (a very loving mother, nonetheless). And I have a rather happy life, actually. This list of Jets goes on, with or without knowing what happened when the names eventually got separated from the numbers. But that's because as a fan, most players have only the value of what they offered in their uniform. However, I do know these names represent people who are worth far more to their friends and family, and I always appreciate it when someone reminds me of that.

NY Jets #48 - Part 2

They wouldn't let linebacker Brashton Satele #48 return to college after four years. Neither would my parents. Ultimately, my loss was not so great because I went to school in Rhode Island, and though I have a special place in my heart for the Ocean State, there was not much to recommend it other than its easy access to Massachusetts. Satele's alma mater was the University of Hawaii. Unlike most players who took the opposite approach, perhaps he thought he could enhance his potential for the NFL draft by playing one more year in college. And why wouldn't he want to return to paradise?

At six feet, he went undrafted in 2010, but showed up at Hofstra and was signed for a three-year deal with the Jets, though I don't remember seeing him play much this season. He is a local hero, and I have a soft spot for guys like that, which is why I liked Danny Woodhead. I have no idea what plans are for him, but if Vernon Gholsten still has a chance, doesn't Brashton Satele? The media in Hawaii rooted for his success, so why shouldn't we? And shouldn't all local news be delivered in Hawaiian shirts?

****

The truth is that strong safety Brian Washington #48 played for the Jets during some empty spaces in my fan memory. I was at college, working at my first full-time job, then in love, then going to grad school and teaching for the first time. It was an Important Time in my life, a time I was using to evolve into the human being I am today, whatever that means.

In one's early 20's, everything appears to hinge on every decision you make. And to a certain degree, I guess it's true. How would I have known to move to Philadelphia - a city I had only visited only in seventh grade with my Dad - to go to grad school if I hadn't met a guy at a party in college who said he was going to move to Philadelphia for his program? A year and a half later, when I thought about a grad school, I remembered the university that my old classmate had mentioned and just applied there, on a whim. Eventually, it was the only program that took me. If I hadn't seen him at that party that seemingly insignificant night I would never have thought of applying there, I would never have moved here, I would never have met my wife, and so on. It felt like a time when Fate was guiding me. I guess It was.

But then it wasn't, quite. Maybe things just happened, as things are wont to do. But in such an atmosphere where Serious Moments seem to be happening everywhere, one is compelled to think that each relationship, each friendship, each trip to the supermarket, each day at work, each conversation, each day is filled with Portent. It gave me panic attacks.

Anyway, Brian Washington played for the Jets for those five seasons, my forgotten years, 1990-94. Among them, the one inspiring moment for the Jets that stands out is the 1992 recovery from paralysis of Dennis Byrd, the defensive tackle who went down against the Chiefs at home. His return to normal life after a paralyzing collision with teammate Scott Merseneau remains a moment of spiritual energy, a miraculous well to which the team can return again and again as needed. No one is permitted to wear #90 on the Jets anymore. Rex Ryan asked Byrd to speak to his players before the playoff game against the Patriots this past year, and the players carried the #90 jersey onto the field with them as they met their presumptuous rivals midfield for the coin toss. In 1992, Dennis Byrd arose and walked by the power of his will. And the Jets beat the Patriots.

Byrd's injury is a prime example of how disoriented I was about all my priorities during the '92 season. That weekend of his injury I was in New York staying over with my luminous and kind girlfriend. We were both lovely people. It was exciting to feel like we were that much in love, even when we didn't really know one another; all that was there were hormones and the incomparable human wish for something eternal, even in the face of hard truths.

We weren't broken up yet, though. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving, and I stayed over and then caught New Jersey Transit at Penn Station on Monday back to Philadelphia. I will never forget where I was, walking from the main entrance of the station, when I saw the Daily News headline about Dennis Byrd's condition. I hadn't even paid attention to the game the day before. Dennis Byrd would almost certainly never walk again, it said. I recall staring at the picture taken of his collision with Merseneau. The Jets had lost 23-7 to Kansas City, but they had long been out of the playoff picture, having lost their first five games what with Ken O'Brien's holdout and the legendary coming and going of Browning Nagle.

I hadn't been paying attention all season. I had been pretending to study to become a college professor. I had been pretending to be in love. I was practicing to become an adult, and mature people who were interested in going into academia didn't care about football. When I stared at that headline, something felt cold and neglected inside of me. It wasn't just the loss of yet another player that season, nor even the notion that the man's life as he knew it was in disarray. I had spent so much time away from my team, and with everything they had been through that year, I felt I had abandoned them. I felt I had made them endure it all alone. Why had I left behind the team of my childhood in their time of need? And for what? For the opportunity to play-act the life of an adult person? What kind of life was that? What kind of a person would do that? What kind of a man flat-leaves his team?

The following week I think I went back up to the city and and stayed with my girlfriend. Our weeks together were numbered. In the meantime, the Jets played Buffalo in a cold, meaningless game at Orchard Park, and they won on an interception for a touchdown near the end scored by Brian Washington. I don't remember watching it or reading the headlines about it on the passing newsstands of a railway station the next day. But Brian Washington united his team in the midst of their funk. It was their last win of their lonely season.

The Times wrote:

"Drawing strength from the faith that Byrd had displayed, and lifted by the news Saturday that Byrd had exhibited some voluntary movement in his legs, the Jets pulled out an improbable 24-17 victory over the Bills to cap what had probably been the most anguished week in the team's history.

When strong safety Brian Washington intercepted a pass by Bills quarterback Jim Kelly and zigzagged 23 yards through the outstretched arms of Buffalo players to score the game-winning touchdown with 1 minute 41 seconds to play, it did seem as if some kind of divine destiny was working for the Jets.

As Washington lay on the frozen turf in the end zone underneath a pile of his teammates, cuddling the football, his mind flashed to Byrd at the hospital.

"When I fell down in the end zone, I just said, 'Yes!' " Washington recalled. "In reflection, we look at Dennis and we look at what happened. He wants us to be strong, because he is very strong. We definitely drew electricity from him in this game today."

Does "divine destiny" work on us, or do we read into the work of our own will the intentions of something greater than ourselves? Does it matter to know one way or the other? Dennis Byrd's legs had begun to move that week. The Jets beat the Bills. He was beginning to rise and walk again.

It would be inaccurate and frankly disrespectful to a man's great achievement to say that I was likewise coming out of my fog with the Jets. The Jets would finish 4-12, then go 8-8 in 1993, a year where Brian Washington would nab six more interceptions. I wouldn't really come back to them until about a year later, when I was dating someone else who understood just how much they once meant to me - my wife. By 1995, hard-hitting Brian Washington and James Hasty joined the Kansas City Chiefs, leaving the Jets with even less than they had to offer the year Dennis Byrd went down. It felt like starting all over again. It felt like home.

NY Jets #48 - Part 1

In 1976, a year for the Jets when everything seemed to end before it began, Clifford Brooks #48 finished his career with us, at defensive back. Clifford Brooks was at least partially like Roscoe Word in that both he and Word played for the Bills and the Jets in 1976. It may even have been they were traded for one another. As usual, I have no idea.

Brooks' rookie season in the NFL was 1972 - his only playoff season - with the Cleveland Browns. Very few people, other than Browns fans (and probably few Browns fans at that) might recall that the 1972 Browns lead the unbeaten Dolphins by a score of 14-13 late in the fourth quarter of their Christmas Eve playoff. I mention this only because the man who who caught the go-ahead TD pass from Browns QB Mike Phipps, the man who briefly put the Dolphins' Perfection in jeopardy was a wide receiver named Fair Hooker. Yes. The man who might have been the impediment standing between the Dolphins and history (other than the 1972 Jets, as I have mentioned before) is a man whose name is synonymous with "Reasonable Prostitute."

As for Clifford Brooks, all I can say is that his Wikipedia entry is short on football and long on business achievements, which doesn't help us. It says things like, "In 2000 became part owner of an ambulance company. Assumed 100% ownership in 2002. Sold the company in 2007." I try to be curious about things like that, but then I'm not. Why an ambulance company? Did he make a profit?

Ah well. The reason why I am where I am, doing what I'm doing at this very moment - sitting up in bed, not sleeping, writing a blog no one will read just hours after watching a Mike Leigh film in a theater where my wife and I were basically the youngest people in the audience (I'm 41) - is because I'm not like Clifford Brooks. I have never taken an interest in running a company that specializes in inspecting hydraulic apparatus for oil and gas drilling. Metaphorically speaking, I am a Fair Hooker, a brief bubble of unexpected circumstance only to be popped again and put back into place by the forces of Perfection.

****

Cornell Gordon #48 played defensive back for the Jets from 1965-69. We presume that he still owns the Super Bowl ring he earned. His middle name is Kermit. He had to play at a variety of different secondary positions for the 1968 squad to compensate for team injuries. I believe he was one of several team members ordered by AFL President Milt Woodard to shave off his moustache that year. Like a number of players from the '68 squad, Gordon left the Jets after the 1969 season. As I recall from his book Gang Green, Gerald Eskanazi suggested that the rotting of the Jets in the 1970's germinated in the exodus of good players from that year on. Eskanazi suggests that Weeb Ewbank's miserly ways as General Manager were largely to blame. Whether Gordon was a part of this or not, I cannot say. He went on to play three seasons with the Denver Broncos.

On a whim, I decided to look him up on Facebook, and I think I may have actually found him. Maybe. Or maybe not. I found a man named Cornell Gordon. Do I friend him? I mean, what if it isn't the Cornell Gordon I'm looking for, and he agrees to it, and I am simply friends with a man for no reason other than the fact that he is named Cornell Gordon? Are the conditions of that friendship any different than they would be if he actually were the former Jet?

Does it matter?

The Internet changes our understanding of what it means to know someone. This also holds true for former Jets defensive back, the man who replaced Gordon at number - and possibly at position - Gus Holloman. At defensive back from 1970-72, Hollomon came from Denver to Flushing just as Cornell Gordon was going to Denver. Was that a trade, like Brooks for Word, or vice versa (if that was a trade, too)? His statistics reveal very little, other than the fact that he blocked a put for the Broncos in 1969 - obviously not the one Steve O'Neal sent deep into the thin air of Mile High for the NFL record that year.

This is where it gets interesting, not in terms of football but in terms of life and all its minute, anthropological, and ultimately banal mysteries on the Internet. First, from all the descriptions of the Gus Hollomon, we see he came from Beaumont, TX and that he went to the University of Houston, where he studied Education. This is what the "Museum of the Gulf Coast" says. But what's strange is that at this link here he is listed as neither a Jet nor a Bronco but apparently a longtime safety for the Miami Dolphins (and a much more successful one at that).

Naturally this caused some consternation until I realized that what I was looking at was not Hollomon's NFL page but his HFL page. Sadly, I don't understand physics in the way that Hugh Everett III did, but I do love the concept of parallel universes, especially when they apply to football. The Historic Football League (HFL) would seem to be an alternate historian's dream come true. Imagine for a moment that your team - let's say the New York Jets - actually made all the right draft choices year in and out; yes, yes, I know, but let's just admit that it was at one time it was statistically possible that this could have happened. Let's imagine that you travel back in time and, in the 1976 NFL Draft, instead of choosing Richard Todd, Shafer Suggs and Greg Buttle (and who could have blamed anyone for choosing Todd and Buttle?) your hindsight enables you to choose instead, say, Jackie Slater. Now imagine such a transaction occurring without you, in a parallel universe. In our universe, Jackie Slater was picked by the LA Rams in the third round that year and played 20 Hall of Fame seasons in the NFL.

But in a parallel universe of the HFL, he plays his second season in 1977 for the New York Jets, alongside Dan Dierdorf; he blocks for OJ Simpson, who is a Jets running back (apparently Juice was traded for someone in this bizarro universe). His quarterback on the Jets is Bert Jones, who throws to Cliff Branch. Just like I remember it. Only not.

Some things don't change in any universe, though. The HFL Yearbook for 1978 suggests this about the Jets' performance during their 1977 HFL season:

The Jets continued to confound the experts, limping to a 3-7 start. The club won five of their last six but it wasn't enough to overtake the Patriots, meaning another year out of disappointment and another year of watching the playoffs on TV.

How about that? I feel like I lived in that parallel universe as a child, though I actually didn't. What's the point of wanting to be a different version of yourself somewhere else, in a parallel universe, when really the results seem to be the same? Maybe in that parallel universe I never became a Jets fan. There, in the third grade, I'm interested only in studying math and science so that someday I will be buying and selling ambulance companies, or becoming an inspector of hydraulic equipment.

But the business of who Gus Hollomon is doesn't quite end there. Google anybody, of course, and you get someone's known business there in the foreground, but you also get the bits and pieces of a person's past, perhaps a part of someone's life you were never intended to know. One of my students looked me up on the Google and found me in a 1990 YouTube clip in a college play. If you don't mind, I won't link to it.

Gus Hollomon's name comes up briefly in the comments under a two year-old blog entry for what appears to be a Princeton, NJ-based blog called TigerHawk with lots of conservatism laced throughout. This entry, dated from September 2008, which was a very different time and place for the hopes and ambitions of conservatives, includes a commenter named dawnfire82 who talks about living in Beaumont, TX and experiencing racism against white people. He writes, "It was accepted as a fact of life that you couldn't stand up to this like your daddy always told you to because if you popped one obnoxious black kid in the mouth, all of his co-ethnics would show up and beat the hell out of you if not then, then later." He refers to African-Americans as "co-ethnics." He's an angry white man, a person who is mostly a dime a dozen in the United States.

But then someone else in the comments named DEC asks dawnfire82 if, having grown up in Beaumont, was dawnfire's high school principal a man named Gus Hollomon. If so, DEC says, "he's a friend of mine."

dawnfire82 (who also has a blog disturbingly called "Black Faced Sinner") replies that he remembers he had a Principal who had a Super Bowl ring. He then provides the URL to Gus Hollomon's HFL page, the same one I provided above, thinking that this was the real Gus Hollomon of the NFL. Why would Hollomon, living we presume in our reality, have had a Super Bowl ring when he never even saw the postseason once? Did Gus Hollomon have a Super Bowl ring from an alternate universe? Was it Cornell Gordon's?

Then dawnfire also provides the URL for the link here, to show a Gus Hollomon retiring from the position as Beaumont's Superintendent.

DEC says that the Gus Hollomon he remembers "played for the New York Jets (with Namath) and the Denver Broncos. That was the one who became superintendent." Which is more correct.

I don't blame these fellows for not communicating clearly. They probably both have the same man. Recall what I said in only recently in a prior entry about athletes and school administration. dawnfire82 doesn't quite have it right about the ring (looking at his blog, I'm not surprised he's incorrect about a lot of things. Yeesh.) but then it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the imaginary worlds we create (and those created for us) from the real ones we live in, especially if they coexist online.

NY Jets #47 - Part 2

Last night, the Jets lost their second straight AFC Championship. They played the first half against Pittsburgh horribly, right down there with the worst of their play this season. They didn't tackle properly; at least three interceptions that could have been. I can't even really articulate all of the frustrations. The second half was less horrible, and had the game gone on for another minute and a half, they would have won, the way they did several times over admittedly lesser teams when the game seemed out of reach. But they didn't do it. Time ran out, the Steelers got their first downs, the game ended.

I have been here before, and not because they were in last year's AFC Title game. My first Jets playoff game was an exact primer for watching how quickly a playoff game can spin out of your team's control. Such was the case with the 12/27/81 Wild Card Game loss to the Buffalo Bills, where the Jets were down 24-10 at halftime, fought back and then lost within the last minute.

Unlike last night, it actually looked worse for the Jets in the second half of the 1981 playoff. In the image below, courtesy of Corbis, Jerry Holmes #47, defensive back, is trying in vain to chase down Bills' running back Joe Cribbs, who is about to score on a 45-yard touchdown run, making the score 31-13 in the third quarter. I remember this. I remember the sense of frustration that only a 12 year-old can feel when he believes that the gods are serving up his hopes to the dogs. The Jets would respond with two touchdowns after Cribbs' score but then would mythically fail on an a Bill Simpson interception Richard Todd pass intended for Derrick Gaffney. I was filled with awe at how terrible it felt. I felt a little of that last night, but my wife and I had friends over, and that was a good distraction from the kinds of things a lonely boy once felt almost thirty years ago when Joe Cribbs added insult to injury.

If you looked closely and see into the eyes of the fans there in the background at Shea Stadium, then maybe you'd see the same expression of horror and haplessness among them. But is that what Jerry Holmes himself is feeling at this precise moment?

This is happening. It is. It's vanishing out of sight. We waited all season, and now this.

I was listening to NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me two weeks ago, and their guest was former Ravens lineman Tony Siragusa, the large guy who stands at the end zone and provides whatever insight that a big guy in the end zone can provide, which, to be honest, is something I don't think I really understand, but Fox does; and that's not a statement I make very often. Anyway, he was asked whether he rooted for the Ravens in the playoffs, and he replied that if they still paid him, he would root for them, but no.

Can Jerry Holmes really feel what the fans are feeling right now, in their knit green hats? Who knows. Maybe not there, not then. Still, we all feel it somewhere. That sense of loss. There it goes. It's vanishing. It's gone. Gone for good.

After the 1983 season, Holmes went to play for Walt Michaels and the New Jersey Generals and then for the Pittsburgh (wait for it) Maulers, both of the USFL. (I believe Mike Rozier played for the Maulers.) Holmes left a good thing with the Jets at a time when better things outside the NFL seemed possible. On the verge of next season's lockout, we now know that the NFL really is the only game making a wholesale profit in America, but Jerry Holmes didn't see any of that way back then. How could he? So he had to try.

According to the vast black hole of information, after his playing career, he went on to become the Head Coach at Hampton University in 2008, turned the team around and then was fired for shopping himself around informally for a better coaching job in the NFL. By publicly shopping around, he apparently hurt the school's recruitment for the following year. Still, he had to try. Now he's a secondary coach for the Hartford Colonials of the UFL, which still exists, I believe. Remember when we talked about the Colonials, earlier? Remember? The former New York Sentinels, whose home was in Hofstra? Ah, the UFL.

Makes me kind of feel bad for Jerry Holmes, although right now I'm liable to recognize loss and misfortune in any given situation. We're all searching for that moment when opportunity will shift our way. We chase after it - it's a job, a love, a piece of serenity. But all things are elusive in their own way, and some objectives are in fact the very ironic source of our undoing. We either watch it evaporate from the stands or on the field, and I don't know which is preferable, for the sense of loss is palpable either way. There it goes. Gone for good.

Whereas sometimes the objective seems impossible to begin with, even as it rips right past you. Tommy Marvaso, #47 played defensive back in 1976, statistically one of the Jets' worst seasons, particularly on defense. After that, he falls off the statistical map, gone for good from the professional world of football. He has one lone, dubious moment in a quick wrap-up of the NFL Films' week 13, below. At about the :20 mark, veteran tight end Jean Fugett is running alongside Marvaso and then suddenly gets behind him and open for a touchdown from Billy Kilmer.



In this case, two people watching helplessly in the stands were Mom and Dad, while the Jets lost 37-16. It was their last game. They didn't get divorced; Dad divorced the Jets after that, giving up his seasons tickets. Like a lot of people, he didn't even go to the last home game against the Bengals. It was a sensible thing to do after a second consecutive 3-11 finish. He had been watching the Jets' fortunes vanish out of sight since 1969, losing season after losing season, and he decided there wasn't really a point to watching it happen anymore.

But in Tommy Marvaso's case, he may not even have had enough time to watch it vanish completely out of his view. There may have been only a quick moment of recognition to see Jean Fugett there, and then not there. Where the hell did he go? he wonders as he looks to see Fugett with the ball. How the hell did that happen so fast? Gone for good, Tommy.

****

Try to grasp this one. Roscoe Word #47 played at cornerback for four different teams over nine games in the 14-game season of 1976. This means that Marvaso replaced him in the secondary in number, if not at position. I'm not sure where Word finished the season, but he had the most traveled single season I have ever seen in the NFL. He began his career with the Jets in 1974. It's difficult to tell where and when he ended up first in the '76 season; it may be that it started with Buffalo, but then he either went to the Giants or back to the Jets, getting his old #47 back, I guess. Then he traveled to that legendary island of misfit toys, the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Here his journey came to an end. Which games and where and when, I cannot say.

If you cannot show a respect for a man who was witness to such an allotment of losing over one season, then I do not think you have a heart beating inside you. Consider that the 1976 Jets (again one of our worst squads on record; a team whose own coach quit on them before the season ended) were not even the last place team in the AFC East. That distinction belonged to the Buffalo Bills who, after finishing 10-4 in 1975, finished 2-12 the year later. The Giants finished 3-11 while the Bucs established the industry standard for ineptitude and went winless. It is statistically possible that on his journey, Roscoe Word may not even have encountered a single victory.

Did it matter? Perhaps no more to Roscoe Word than it did to Jerry Holmes. We assume he collected a paycheck wherever he went. His only complaint may have been having to collect all the W-2's. But it's the idea that maybe he finished his career with those legendary 0-14 Bucs that intrigues me. To be a benchwarmer, a replacement, a cog in as mightily broken a piece of machinery as the Buccaneers were that year must have been a humbling experience or, possibly, surreal. Perhaps he saw himself as a fly on the wall, a witness to history. If the great affair is to move, then the trip ought to be interesting.

All I know is that he made a late-game interception in 1974 that made my Dad exhale with a violence of joy that only a man in the throes of passion can truly express, as the Jets held onto a 21-16 victory over the Patriots at Foxboro, keeping the Jets' winning streak on track that year. I have written of this before; it's my ur-Jets moment. The Jets were out of the playoffs by the time Word ended the game, but Dad went to the following week's game against Miami at Shea, which Word helped end yet again with a late-game interception of Bob Griese. Dad came home buoyant, willing to renew his season tickets another year, willing to believe all over again. In two weeks, I saw him become a boy again right before my eyes, and because of this, I think Word is the man most responsible for making me what I am today - a convert, a Jets fan, a neurotic, a wreck, a shell of a human being who fights against high expectation each week after a win and who finds reassurance of humanity's innate ridiculousness with each Jet loss, the naively felt possibility that comes with each Jet win.

Thank you, Roscoe Word. For better or for worse, you have made me who I am. And because the human soul's limitless capacity for faith cannot be measured in a statistical value that I yet know of, I am left only with the option of referring to you as an infinite Jet.

I Know It's Over

It has been a wonderful season, but as was the case with last year's conference championship, I am utterly heartbroken. And now I begin the process of letting go of the pain. There are people who die needlessly each day. There are people who never get a chance to deflect their anxieties upon the fortunes of a football team because they live impoverished under repressive regimes (I'm looking at you, North Korea and Myanmar), or in shacks under the eye of the Chinese government, or maybe in North Philadelphia, where every day is an embodiment of where the American Dream has failed.

It doesn't matter. People I know from all around the country whom I have known over the years know exactly what the last few weeks have meant to me. I am deeply proud that my team made it is as far as they did, but when the party is over, a part of you dies, too. This has been a great season, not just because it is the first time the Jets have gone to the AFC Championship two years in a row; no, I am happy because this has not really been a typical Jets season. Or maybe it was. Nothing has been taken for granted, except for the fact that Rex Ryan has made this season all about him. By doing so, his team has reflected what was best and worst about him.

In this single year, Jenn Sterger revealed the intimate self-portraits of Brett Favre, followed by the Jets being sued for sexual harassment (again, thanks Brett), saw a sideline journalist get harassed without legal ramifications, witnessed the hiding in plain sight of Ryan's love for his wife's feet, the impact of Sal Alosi's knee. Rex Ryan is not responsible for all of the above, but he is, above all, a lightening rod, like Sarah Palin. Only Ryan is actually talented. Is he a great coach? I'm not sure. He is either a genius, or a dumb, lucky lummox; maybe something in between. Either way, he said my favorite line of the year; no, not the one about the goddamned snack. He said, "Same old Jets. Going in the AFC Championship second year in a row." I've been waiting a long time for someone to sarcastically respond like that to the worst voices in my head.

I only know that the Jets never had the sense of this game's tempo. There were outplayed in a way that they would never have allowed themselves to be against the Patriots. Why did they throw on fourth down when they should have run? I don't understand it. But it doesn't matter. I know it's over.